Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Firefox 4, bringing WebM support to the web

Today we released Firefox 4, the latest browser from Mozilla. There's a lot to love in Firefox 4 - better performance, hardware acceleration and a streamlined interface. All of that is great, but I'm here to talk about WebM support.

To understand why this is really important you need to understand global market share numbers for browsers. According to StatCounter, Firefox accounts for about 30% market share - or nearly a third of all browser users. When you combine that with Chrome and Opera it means that about 50% of internet users will have access to the high-quality WebM codec over the next few months, following the Firefox 4 adoption curve.

We've supported HTML5 and standards-based video since Firefox 3.5 with Theora and Vorbis support, and we're happy to add WebM to that mix since it offers an even higher-quality option for the web.